Gareth Tyson
Dr Gareth Tyson is a lecturer and Internet Data Scientist at Queen Mary University of London. Prior to this he worked at King's College London and Lancaster University, as well as holding visiting positions at University College London and Cambridge Computer Lab. His work takes a data-driven approach to understanding and solving emerging challenges in Internet systems. He tends to sit at the intersection between traditional systems design (i.e. understanding technology) and social computing (i.e. understanding humans). By collecting, compiling and combining empirical insights on these two things, he strives to improve the online security and performance for both humans and technology alike.
Bridging the Internet’s Data Divide in Africa
Data has become an increasingly prominent aspect of our daily lives, as well as a key economic aspect of the Internet. Uses of Internet data span all the way from consumer-facing applications (e.g. targeting adverts) to optimising infrastructure-level concerns (debugging network errors). Due to this, recent years have seen network operators building up huge data collection platforms to diagnose problems, yet there are still many parts of the world where such deployments are sparse. In this talk I will discuss our recent work gathering Internet datasets in Africa, and how we have gone about exposing them to the community. Specifically, our goal has been to equip infrastructure operators with fine-grained insight into problems and bottlenecks facing regional networks, such that both policy and technical innovation can be better designed. I will highlight some of the inherent problems in this space, as well as open challenges worth exploring.